


Like Clockwork

by Zafaria



Category: Pirate101 (Video Game)
Genre: Fantasy, OHHHHHHHH how i liked writing this until ben's part, Short Story, Wizard101 - Freeform, and then it happened again..., i need to stop?, pirate, pirate101 - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-13
Updated: 2017-12-13
Packaged: 2019-02-14 04:34:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 6
Words: 5,668
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12999975
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zafaria/pseuds/Zafaria
Summary: If there’s people lurking behind pillars in the crevices of the room they aren’t friends. Friends wouldn’t do that. Strange vagabonds forcefully corrupted by an unspeakable evil do, though.





	1. Faithless One

**Faithless One**

          Josef Hawkins was a benevolent pirate. His crew loved him, and he used his travels to new lands as an excuse to meet the locals and help them. Sometimes it was tracking down a lost kid, like a hidden treasure. Sometimes it was recovering shipments scrounged by bandits. Always, it was something he found exciting, endearing in a way; and, always, it was something with good pay.

    But that was the problem. Josef Hawkins was a pirate. And by the Armada’s standards, this was an irrevocable, inexcusable offense. The clockwork army sought him out, wherever his ship carried him. The fierce and jagged black sails of four or five Armada cruisers were always in pursuit of Josef’s snow-blue galleon, a looming constant that he knew he’d one day have to face.

     The Armada were automatons, their insides the humming and vibrating of gears and springs. Their faces plaster-white masks, expressionless and featureless. Behind the eye cutouts, there was an inhumane tar black, housing nothing. They adhered to strict military order and authority, especially over other less perfect machines.

    This is the manner by which they colonized other lands and living beings, and how they kept their control over them.

   And they hated those that did not conform. Piracy was technically illegal under the Armada, but plenty of young people with a knack for adventure turned to it. It was a chance to float around the Spiral. To see the universe and all that connects it, mystical and strange.

     Josef wanted to see the Spiral threads that connected the worlds. They were vibrant, colorful auras tracing pathways in the dark sky. All he had to do was follow them, and he’d be guided somewhere new.

     At some point, he followed a fiery orange thread to the frontier town of Edison. When he entered the realm, the automatons’ cruisers were waiting.

     He gritted his teeth with his eyes wide, and frantically spun the wheel around until the ship weaved back out onto the Spiral threads. The cruisers followed.

    His days of wandering as an outlander had ended, and his days of running as a fugitive began. The crew of the Silver Star would be sailing away from the despotic machines for months. The light of their ship would become dusky from their travels in skies and their stops at small worn outposts. The Star would dodge into caverns and between rock formations to distract the Armada and create an opportune moment to breathe. Josef and his crew would nap, always looking out the window into the darkness of a grotto, always waiting until the brief lapse in tension expired.

     The day he was caught started as unremarkable as any other. Dry air in Junction swirling up dust and hazy red skies created the backdrop for his arrest. A hole was shot through the silvery hull, and Josef’s crew peddled away from the cruisers. They found a small arroyo to cram their ship into while they waited for the cruisers to pass and scrambled to patch the hull with planks of wood.

     The Silver Star glided smoothly down the arroyo, tracing the path of the river that flowed through the bottom of the canyon. Their captain left the wheel to one of the deckhands while he stood on his toes and braced himself against the railing.

    The slow lulling of the waters far below made him feel relieved somehow. He wished that the situation wasn’t so dire, as he would’ve had the ship descend down to the level of the river so they all could stand on the shores.

     He imagined it as clearly as the crystalline waters slicing through the red sands. They’d be arranged next to the river, tossing rocks in to see if they would skitter off the surface, poking at the scorpions and insects with a dried piece of a bramble.

     Engrossed in the scenery, he failed to see the rock spire in front of him and call out to his crewmember holding the wheel. A gash was torn in the hull of the ship, and the vessel began to rapidly decline.

     Planks were retrieved from cargo, and bookcases and bunks in the quarters were disassembled to be slapped together over the ripped shell of the Star. Josef cried when he went to see the damage from the inside of the ship, the side of his Star ravaged and open, like an unsealed wound. Fingers scrambled in toolboxes, looking for hammers, pricking on nails, frantically clutching bolts and wrenches. Metal clattered from every exposed edge of the hull as the crew worked in a frenzy, rushing to complete the patch. Rushing to continue the slow, endless crawl away from the Armada.

     It was not long after that the nose of an Armada cruiser jutted out from the path further down the canyon, in the direction that Josef had been heading. The automatons pulled up next to Josef’s mangled ship, uncomfortably close. Ropes grappled around the masthead and the rudder, and he looked around him at the crumpled deck and his crew working so desperately to repair it.

     He couldn’t say he was surprised it ended this way.

     He did not flinch when the machines grabbed his arms with gripping cruelness and pointedness no human could ever emulate. He did not wince as his heavy brass armor scraped against the dark wood deck of the cruiser as they made their way to the brig. He did not kick his legs or try and twist his arms away. As he was dragged away, his head rolled downward.

      His face only expressed sorrow that his great adventure was ending.


	2. Insensitive Two

**Insensitive Two**

   Faye Jennings was in it for the money. She grew up in Flotsam, living on the scraps people tossed on the ground outside the tavern. When she was twelve, she found her first home in a red-painted barrel with rotting wood. Then, there was the day that a handsome orange frigate moored on the docks. Faye watched as the owner, wearing a long black overcoat and wide-brimmed hat, stepped off the boat. He tapped his cane on the ground, the golden tip of the accessory rapping the worm-eaten docks.

   Faye still crouched behind a crate as the man walked through the swinging gates and up the thatched platforms and ramps to the tavern. When he got up to the bar, he saw an old red barrel sitting out front. There was a tarp veiling a hole that led to the cellar.

     And while he was too engulfed in his disgust for these things, Faye shimmied on the rope that docked the frigate. People only noticed and started hollering after she was well-distanced from the island. She promised herself she would never live in barrels or eat scraps ever again as she sailed out on the bright ship, golden curvatures and a glossy lacquer decorating the exterior.

   Her appetite for more was insatiable. More clothes, more food, more decorations. More gold. Desperation led her to do bold, irredeemable things.

     She stole from the bank in Junction and left her trail deceivingly cold. Cogburn couldn’t figure out that the thief was an outsider for weeks, and when he finally did, Faye was already sheltered by dissipation and rumors.

     While the sheriff squandered time pursuing ghastly leads that wafted away when they seemed to almost be at a resolution, Faye was enjoying her time in Port Regal. She organized her crew, and together they broke into the armory, crawling up into the building through the sewers. They annihilated the guards and dashed out with muskets and gunpowder; enough to wage epic war. They would never be challenged again.

     With her musket slung over her shoulder and a cruel, daunting blade strung to her side, she made a frenzied run for the Jade Palace. The wealth was immeasurable there, and she would have it all.

     On the clean marble cobbles, her feet tracked dirt and pieces of decaying food scraps from some inky stopover tucked away in Flotsam. Rheum dripped from her bloodshot eyes and nose. She couldn’t even calculate how much money she had spent while sitting on a worn wooden stool for hours. Her pockets never felt lighter after a night out at the bar, no matter how many empty glasses stacked in front of her.

     She approached a villager standing in front of the stucco walls and rice-paper screen of his house. The villager was hunched over, gardening. His fingers curled around the gentle earth, upturned in a small, rich mound where the seed was planted. Maybe it was a perennial, maybe it was a fruit tree.

     Faye wasn’t concerned with it.

     While the villager finished up, patting the soil and smiling contently at it, Faye stood behind him and let her shadow cast on his weary, curved back. His hat hung low on the crown of his head, shielding his face from the beating sun. She looked on either side of her to signal her crew that it was time for action.

     The villager pushed himself up off his knees that had prodded into the ground. They had light grass stains, pigments meshed into the finely woven silk of his trousers. His face was tender and splashed with a faint bit of pink.

     Color quickly faded when he turned around and saw the mincing, toothy smiles of the pirates. Faye quickly pulled her dagger from her side and poised it next to his wide, shaking eyes. She leaned down to him, taunting.

     That day, the crew raided the entire village, turning out every pocket, breaking in every door, and ripping every tapestry from the walls. Sometimes, Faye would grab a vase or a mug and ask the owner if it was valuable; and when they said it wasn’t, she hurled it at the wall and scowled at the person she terrorized. The same, clenched, red look crossed her face whenever she did this. They burned the village when they were done seizing goods. The small mound that the villager had originally planted sat under a layer of soot and rubble.

     The valuables sat mountainous in the cargo hold. The captain’s quarters poured with jade, gold, silk, prized ornamental flowers.

     They went to Valencia next, to sell off prizes. In the library, their eyes scaled walls of tomes, and they quietly planned their next heist.

     Cargo from ships in the Skyway. They rammed other boats, fired at them broadside, then roped them in and boarded. Faye’s crew would shove the hostages off the side of the boat while she tore open crates in the hold and carried items off in armfuls.

     The Armada noticed quickly. A stalled ship sitting in the middle of the lanes was bound to draw attention.

      It was on one of these treasure-grabs that Faye came above deck carrying gold necklaces wrapped around her arms and trophies craned into her shoulder. She howled and dropped her prizes on the deck with a clatter as two Armada marines jammed their muskets into her temples.

     She felt the wind being sucked out of her lungs as if perdition’s vortex had finally caught up with her for all the thievery, the terror and wrongs she had imparted in the skyways.

     For the first time, she was afraid of the consequences.


	3. Ignoble Three

**Ignoble Three**

     Jonathan Ashburn was a pirate by blood. He spent his youth grasping at ropes of the mast sails, pulling himself up higher and higher, a shortblade clenched precariously between his white, worn-down teeth. The cold metal bit at his tongue and nicked the corners where his bottom and top lips met.

     His hands were braided with the same details of the fibers in the rope, pieces of ragged skin flaking off on his palms. He remembered sleeping, curled up in the crow’s nest of his parents’ emerald-green galleon. The sun was hot on his face despite having the brim of his hat tilted over his head. When he woke up, his cheeks were almost the same tinge of red as the freckles that dotted them.

     His mother and father crafted a legacy, benevolent and loving, not just to him. Crowds of people stood at the docks and waved them off whenever they departed. And crowds of people would cheer and grin wherever they arrived, the wooden docks flooded with inhabitants eager to see the “good pirates”.

     They had been good pirates. Jonathan’s mother started her studies as a prevailing scholar from boggy Dimwood Vale. She uncovered artifacts buried under the hungry sands, overgrown temples percolated by vines. In the course of all this, she secured a galleon for exploration purposes, to achieve her goals of going from world to world.

      His father was a sheriff back in Port Regal. The colony was left to devise its own solutions after the central government collapsed and tensions overflowed into a civil war. In times of turmoil, criminals arose to prey on the already weakened and defenseless. Seeing this, Jonathan’s father enrolled in training to become an officer. The rising despotism and crime required more staffing and attention, so the young man quickly ascended to the position of sheriff.

     The townspeople adored and admired him. He didn’t just fulfill his role as a defender of the people, but he would greet shop owners by name, purchase small trinkets for the children, and help recover lost books that school bullies had thrown in stormdrains.

     Port Regal’s situation transformed to a more drastic one, akin to the plot of the epics Jonathan’s mother had so dearly deciphered. Invaders held the area hostage and terrorized the ships, stealing machinery and supplies.

     Jonathan’s father never gave up. He took to being a vigilante, bought his own boat and knocked the antagonizing cruisers out of the sky with cannon fire and valiantly imbued castings.

    That’s how they met, they told him. She was at Port Regal trying to smuggle artifacts and passages in wooden crates, and he stopped the galleon to search the contents. A bashful smile splashed across his face; he felt like a fool when he ripped the top off the containers only to be enticed by stories of old and ceramic vases of ethereal age and origin.

     When the mysterious machine showed up in the skyway, it’s base whirring and the prongs of the gears grinding by like teeth of a starving beast, it was time to abandon Port Regal. It was a large island, a floating amalgam of metal where the automatons would spawn and spread from. The colony was surrendered to it’s agonizing fate, overrun with the clockworks.

     They had long memories and held a grudge for the man who had delayed their conquer for so long. And by proxy, his wife.

     The two traversed the Spiral and nabbed sacred tomes and hallowed icons to protect them from the devastation of industrialization and apathy only the machines wrought.

     Jonathan bore the same torch. He was destined to follow in the paths of his parents, grimy hands encapsulating sparkling jade idols and books that time had eaten away at. The flaky pages would make crinkling sounds even when lifted by just the pinched, flattened corners, and he would unsteadily try to turn each sheet in one fluid movement to prevent tearing.

     Looking out over the decking into the lucid blue of the sky, he’d think of the stories his mother had about the Aquilian heroes, how they defeated the minotaur and his sons, fought each other in arenas, and ventured to live as sage hermits in caves. He wanted to be honorable like them. Like his parents.

     His quarters were chocked full of all the stories his mother had read and retold to him. All the books migrated from owner to owner, land to land, to unite in a grand library that perhaps chronicled the origins of the Spiral itself.

     And all of them were stolen. Regardless of intent, the items were missing from a place where there would be a be bereft display, the white-hot light of a museum shining down on a glass greenhouse with nothing on the velvet carpet.

     The Armada had taken stock of what was missing from their precious artifacts. Of the hundreds of books in Jonathan’s collection, the Armada was truly deprived of two.

     It was uncomfortable, but under his pillow, Jonathan kept his mother’s favorite anthology of Mooshu legends and lore. The story of the warring clans was bookmarked by a wrinkled, parched piece of an old brown map, the directions and meaning lost to a cipher his mother never got to translate.

     The other book he kept on the shelf. It was wider than most, with brown binding, and just thick enough to be a perfect specimen for stashing things. The center was hollowed out like a box, and a marvelous magenta crystal was inside. The remains of the pages sank under it’s weight, indenting with the jagged polygons of the stone. His mother kept it in a small chest originally, and she had only showed it to him once he reached sixteen years of age.

      When the Armada ambushed his ship in the Subata Skyway, they went for the biggest of the books first.

      Jonathan wept as he was stripped of his treasured stone and cherished stories. Shackles clamped around his wrists and legs, uncaring and cold, ignorant towards the boy’s soft, thoughtful heart.

     He could not fight back like his father.


	4. Unreliable Four

**Unreliable Four**

     Benjamin Wright was already on the run, and a master at slinking between worlds. The dark edges of the Spiral sheltered his ship where no one dared venture. The few that did had the misfortune of encountering Benjamin.

     It had started out with an accident. Or maybe it was intentional. Benjamin was touring Blood Shoals with one of his peers. Water was piled in a deep well, a luminescent blue and stagnant, the glassy surface only interrupted by the boys running their fingers or toes through the swimming image. The only glimpse they got when looking into the well was down into unseen depths that existed below where the light touched. What stirred in them was a mystery. Or, a surprise.

     Benjamin grew up in Scrimshaw, under the hulking, observant skeleton of the Leviathan. Nobody knew what it was, but it encompassed the entity of the island itself.

     When the weather was bad and the rain fell heavy from the sky, the Leviathan was crying. Sometimes the moon aligned perfectly in the vacant eye socket of the gargantuan skull laying overhead the city center. This, they had said, was the unfathomable and judging eye of the beast, encouraging them to repent for their unspoken transgressions.

     Early on, Benjamin had met the other boy. They grew up, but only together in the relative sense, that his house was across the street and up a story from Benjamin’s house. They had never really been friends, but they hovered around each other.

     When school began, they were sorted into the same class, emphasizing their talents as intuitive, brash personalities. They even looked similar, standing at about the same height, both with broad, flat shoulders.

     It was no mirror. Benjamin soon found his peer to be less of a companion and more a comparison. Benjamin was never smart enough, never scored high enough or answered the teacher’s questions. He hesitated and shook too much, a single second would slip by him and gravity kept his forearm limp on his desk as he saw the other boy’s limb spring up from the corner of his eye.

     After a day of toleration in school, he’d return home to Mother, who convinced Benjamin to befriend the other boy. Maybe his good influence and habits would wear into Benjamin and mold him into perfection. Maybe.

     It was one of these visitations that the boys rowed a small dingy over to Blood Shoals, a scraggly, handcrafted map sketched into beige parchment to guide them. Benjamin carried a chunk of granite in his pocket, and they would joke that it was their windstone leading them to the new lands. They would trawl the caverns for treasure and play at being pirates for the afternoon.

     When they saw the pool of water, they stopped to contemplate in it. Each boy watched the other’s reflection, the slow, cautious movements of the mouth as the hidden secrets tumbled, leaking like the drips of water falling from stalactites above.

     Benjamin said he felt eclipsed. Benjamin never told the other boy it was because of him. And then, Benjamin had a curious revelation, perhaps elucidated only by the green glow of jealousy that surrounded him.

     The boys were alone in the caves. The water before them taunted.

     In Benjamin’s pocket, the granite chunk called to him. And in the next moment, it collided with the back of the other boy’s skull, the dying echoes of the collision flung around the cavern; a few drops of dark blood dripped into the pure pool.

     Benjamin stared a minute, then rummaged around for an amulet or ring. He found the boy’s elephant totem, and shoved it in his pocket with the rock, crimson stains seeping into fabric. He pushed the corpse into the pool, the surface broken by sloppy splashes. Benjamin prodded the boy and waited for him to sink.

     Finally, he felt like he had been better than the other boy, for one thrilling, devilish moment. There was something gratifying about the smell of rust in the air, something satisfying in the way the mass of the other boy’s body was engulfed by the shadows so readily.

     Benjamin jumped in the dingy, frowning. His head stayed fixated towards the horizon, and he disappeared into the mists swaying in the sky beyond the reaches of Scrimshaw and Mother, beyond the unwavering, vengeful eye of the Leviathan.

     The body floated up to the surface of the well two days later. It was discovered by a search team within the week.

     Only then did the people of Scrimshaw understand the timeline of things. Only then did they realize their culprit was one of their own, now long gone after slipping through their fingers like the silky sand they thought he was.

     Only then did Benjamin remove all reservations owed to anyone. They were all fair game.

     He would wait behind houses for the people to open their doors, follow them swiftly and silence them with an unpredictable blow from behind. It was repetitive, rehearsed.

     There might be one thing that sat on a nightstand or a sideboard that caught his eye. Benjamin would go, trace the outline with his fingers, marvel at it in his bloodthirsty excitement, and then quickly stow it away in his overcoat. The stolen keepsake would sit heavy in his pocket like a lumpy rock.

     And it was only ever the one thing he’d need. Perusing the house for too long left him at greater risk; more time at the crime scene, more fingerprints dotted on the belongings that sat as vacant witnesses. He’d collect his trophy and continue on to another sleepy world, lulled into security because all the crimes before had seemed distant, incomprehensible.

     The air stirred as he approached Valencia, like an oncoming storm knowing in its power, reveling in its indifference and detachment from the land it would taint.

     He wanted to see the library. He’d go to a slower, more relaxed atmosphere for a little while, he joked. What was one quiet bookkeeper going to do, and who would notice a librarian’s absence? Libraries were places of silence, after all.

     Benjamin moved the librarian behind a pile of books that was collecting dust in a crevice, shoved from conscious thought.

     When he was done, his bloodied hand wrapped around ornate golden handles and pulled at the door, revealing a squadron of automatons. They had seen him sneak into the library and saw the red carelessly splattered on his hands, clinging to the bottom of his boots.

     Blood would fall off Benjamin’s face next.   


	5. Disloyal Five

**Disloyal Five**

     Lynne Finkle tried to duel her way across the Spiral. She regularly sparred outside of taverns, pulped her classmates when they made snide remarks about her pitted face or cracked teeth. Nobody ever sat right with her.

      She was a tavern legend. One week, while she visited Sujimara Village, someone wanted to test that statement’s veracity. The first night there, her hand was blackened and embedded with splinters. Blood wrapped its way around her knuckles, and the skin between the bony peaks was split from forceful impacts to an offender’s face.

     The second night, her lips were sliced, and a tooth was snapped in half. The exposed root trickled blood into her mouth. Sometimes the outflow poured over her bottom lip and curled down her chin.

     The week went on, with Lynne’s collection of bruises expanding and encompassing every limb; every bare patch of pink skin was consumed by a tender, dark crust during the muggy, suffocating nights. At one point, she walked out of the bar with glass shoved in her arm after she smashed a stein into another patron’s face.

     She used the money people tossed her in the brawl to replace the mug, looking at the coin between her warped fingers before gingerly laying it on the oak counter and hopping off her stool wordlessly.

     There was never a loss. One of the tavern chalkboards in the Kraken Skulls listing the spirit selections was wiped clean and instead listed Lynne’s unbeaten record. Seventeen battles without surrender. Then thirty-one. Then seventy. On the eve of the one-hundred and first open melee, a roamer volunteered her fists to duel against Lynne.

     And when they landed in the hollows of Lynne’s cheeks, it was dizzying and blinding. The roamer balled her fists and socked Lynne’s upper arm. Lynne stumbled to the ground, yanking a wooden stool down with her.

     Blood poured out of her nose as faces gasped and shouted while looming over her.

     Glass shattered on the floor as the frustrated soundings of people who had lost coins gambling on Lynne began to crowd the cramped room. The stool next to Lynne was lifted into the air, then it smashed into the wallboards and splintered.

     Only the hazy orange burn and buzz of the lantern overhead was perceivable to her. Her stomach lurched in deep, exhausted draws of breath.

     She patted around, looking for something to cling to as she tried to stand. Rolling onto her haunches, her fingers grasped the edge of the counter. Her arm flung around her stomach, she looked around the space at the mottle of tangled limbs, flying dishware, and whipping stools.

    Lynne was chased out of the bar and down to the beach. Her feet stuttered down the steep, shifting slope of sand, and she tumbled across the shore until a rock impeded her rolling.

     The mob of furious tavern-goers bounced down the ramp after her.

     Lynne jumped up, feet sliding as they hit the sand and sprung upwards again, strides hurried and long. The sand kicked up off her navy boots and sprayed behind her towards the pursuers.

     All it took was one bad fight, and she was no longer the vagabonds’ champion. None of them ever really had any allegiance to her, just the guarantee of a return on their gambles. She was short, an underdog. The regulars knew of her biting, stubborn nature and pitted her against brawny-looking types to maximize their profits.

     And now they jeered her and threw bottles from the shore, filled with the hollow pangs of hunger from their lost investments. They felt swindled.

     Lynne wanted notoriety, and she had a taste of it every night she spent in the Kraken Skulls. The whooping crowds, the money eagerly changing hands, eventually finding its way to her gnarled and marred fingers. And as quick as the snap of her fingers against paper scripts or the quick flip of a coin, the crowd then decried her as a dud, a mistake and a false cause. If they felt swindled, she felt downright betrayed.

     So, she didn’t even look back at the shore as she paddled into the skyways on a rickety dingy made of split barrels and planks of wood someone pried up from the docks. Nails stuck their heads out diagonally, some smashed and twisted into corkscrews after being clipped by a hammer.

     Three weeks later she entered back into the foray in Gallo Loco Cantina. True criminals would camp out in the arroyos around the town. At night, they’d move in to the Cantina for their drinks and threats and brawls. And Lynne would win, even when they drew pistols and pointed them at her wide eyes and clenched teeth. She always found a way.

      The daytime changed when the automatons colonized the skyway, but the nightlife never wavered. In the cellar, fights would still play out, gnashing teeth abound in the audience as spit and blood sprayed from a face boxed with Lynne’s prominent, sharp knuckles. Her joints popped when they smacked her opponent’s face. Lynne shook her hand with a wince as the other person sunk to the floor, unconscious.

     The Armada began to crack down on the illicit activities in Cooper’s Roost Skyway, and pinned everyone under their thumb in a terrorizing regime. The bandits from the Cantina were some of the first to disappear, and naturally, they tattled on the mysterious and violent girl who busted faces at the bar every night. Machines could not be knocked out, and there way no way for her to pummel down the crusty iron bars that jailed her with her cracked, bare fists. This was the unwinnable fight she could not rebound from.

     She worried as she entered reformation with a collection of vagabonds uprooted from across the Spiral. Her others were fugitives, greedy, distant, and dazed.

     They weren’t introduced to each other, and Moo Manchu promptly began extrapolating their worst talents. They were persuaded to viciousness, forced to down gulps of a stale-tasting, searing brew.

     She learned that she really hadn’t liked a single, wretched soul in this world after all.


	6. Nefarious Six

**Nefarious Six**

     There is a tower, on the Paths of Penance. It is eleven stories tall. It sits at a dead end, surrounded by stone braziers and barren snow.

     On the first floor, spikes protrude from the ground, waiting for a springing step overtop to launch them viciously upwards.

    On the second floor, there are statues of beasts that sit at attention as the petals of dying cherry blossoms float past the windows. They hunger for visitors, and long to be released from their stone shells. One day, they will erupt from the cracked pieces of rubble and bite at the intruders.

    The third floor is filled with braziers that begin to smolder if one enters the room. A noxious purple gas crowds the air, and suffocates those who don’t work their way past the level fast enough.

     Some of the floors above are a treacherous combination of all of these. There is only one break in this cascading, collecting summation of dangers.

    On the tenth floor, just below where Moo Manchu sits on a lavish golden throne, the room is completely empty, save for one basin.

     It sits in the middle of the room, a chalice daringly balances on the rim of the pedestal. There are hooked fixtures like horns that curve inward over the bowl.

     The bowl holds a glassy liquid, green like it is made of melted emerald and swirled with the heavy, inky color of lead. Standing over it a minute, there is a glimmer of more than just the slow rise and fall of the separate currents writhing around. It takes all but an instant, and then memories will flash by too. Pain, loss, wrongdoing, guilt, suffering. They twist the mind and convolute it like the unmixed colors circling in the basin.

     As the glow dances around in the irises, the face swallowed by the ethereal glint rising from the drifting nectar, one feels compelled to drink. There are visions of escape, and eternity. Maybe indulging in the mysterious brew will eliminate the woes.

     And many do. Many drink and drink, the potion tasting sweet one moment, like a plum, then slowly morphing into a bitter gunmetal taste. For all that have tried, it always evolves past this point, to a burning poisonous feel.

     Faye watches from the far left corner. Benjamin is in the shadows on the top right. Lynne looks out over the room from her unseen crevice. Jonathan is concealed behind the murky castings of a pillar, always smiling as he watches the weak and tempted give in to the strange elixir. Josef waits in the doorway to the next floor, invisible behind the absence of the light. They all watch, eyes glowing venomously, heads titled to the side in interest and hunger. They lick their lips as the cup touches the lips of the drinker. They lapse into familiar ominous smiles as they watch person after person collapse on the floor.

     Faye grabs the left arms, while Benjamin grabs the right. Lynne and Jonathan wrap their clutches around the ankles, and together they toss each one down the flights of stairs until they crash against the door outside with an empty and hollow bang. Josef plucks the cup from the ground and wipes the edge of the chalice on his sleeve before fixing it in its teetering spot on the rim of the basin.

    The five are careful not to slip on the spatterings that cover the edges of every step. They throw the mangle of limbs out the first-floor window, behind the pagoda. The snow turns red.

     One day, someone worthy will venture in. They will be strong, egregious. And maybe they too will drink. Their eyes will glow with hate, their hands will stain with blood and callouses from tossing carnage to where it is no longer visible.

      The basin waits for you in the center of the room, the elixir languidly purling inside.

**Author's Note:**

> I didn't think this would be over 5000 words! I'd love to hear thoughts, as usual!
> 
> Edit: Fixed a line. Something about injuring oneself on snails... naturally, my work as a bog herald, but also a malacologist, has slipped its way into this one.


End file.
